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GARFIELD MEMORIAL; 



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LEWIS K. IUHBARl). 



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OARFIELD MEMORIAL: 



A DISCOURSE 



DELIVERED IN LUDLOW, SEPTEMBER 26, 1881, 



LEWIS B. HIBBARD. 



PUBLISHED BY THE CITIZENS OF LUDLOW. 



LUDLOW : 

WARNER & HYDE, BOOK AND JOB PRINTERS. 
1881. 






Ludlow, Vt., October 10, 1881. 
Rev. Lewis B. Hibbard. 

Dear Sir : lu response to our owu feelings as a committee, 
and in deference to the expressed wish of this community, we respectfully 
request your consent to the publication, in pamphlet form, of the admirable 
discourse delivered by you, at our invitation, the 26th. ult., in memory of 
the late President Garfield. 

Trusting that any personal feelings you may entertain will yield to the 
public wish, we are Yours, sincerely, 

Alfred J. Hough, G. I. Howe, 
Geo. W. Billings, O. Gassett, 
N. M. Pierce. 



Ludlow, Vt., October 17, 1881. 

Alfred J. Hough axd others. 

Gentlemen: Yours of the 10th iust., soliciting a copy of 
the Garfield Memorial Address for publication, has been received. I 
comply with your request because I cannot well do otherwise. No one 
knows better than I do the defects of the address, for it is neither sermon 
nor eulogy, but an attempted union of the two. No preacher who has a 
proper conception of his work is willing to degrade himself or his pro- 
fession by using a text as a mere motto for a discourse, or a peg on which 
to hang a series of reflections, even of a religious nature. Professor Shedd 
has said of the true sermon, "Every discourse must be but the elongation 
of a text." But the scope of President Arthur's proclamation for the day 
necessitated a modification of the original plan, and the discourse, there- 
fore, was made to embrace a wider range. As suggested at the time, the 
real problem was what to omit, since the life and character of our lamented 
dead were so fruitful of suggestive study. 

I am aware that the solenmity of the occasion, the fusion of thought 
and feeling incident to such an event, will be wanting in the printed form, 
for, as Quintilian suggested, the reader misses something which the hearer 
enjoyed. 

I have ventured to make some slight verbal changes, and have inserted 
a few paragraphs omitted at the time of its delivery. 

Yours, Lewis B. Hibbard. 






DISCOURSE. 



Psalm 97:2. — Clouds and darkness are round about him: 
righteousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne. 

The primary idea of clouds and darkness was of the terror and 
wrath of God whom Israel had offended at Mount Sinai. Then 
it came to have the idea wliich we naturally associate with it, — 
that of mystery. The other expression of the Psalmist, " right- 
eousness and judgment are the habitation of his throne," conveyed 
first of all the idea of justice meted out to the transgressor — 
which is the last thing the wrong-doer wants; give him anything 
but justice. Then there came the secondary idea, of the right- 
ness of God's conduct, or the righteousness of his reign. 

Hence the language of the text involves this grand truth,— 

THE MYSTERY AND RECTITUDE OF GOd's GOVERNMENT 
IN HUMAN AFFAIRS. 

We are a nation of mourners to-day, and we are not here for 
words of eulogy alone, for this universal tender sympathy and 
respectful affection for the dead is a grander eulogy than any 
which human lips can utter. We stand here in the presence of 
our sorrow — a sorrow as far-reaching as Christendom itself — and 
looking up to Him whose throne is founded in justice and judg- 
ment, and whose secret pavilions are girt about with clouds of 
mystery, with reverent, humble hearts, we ask, "Lord, what 
lessons of chastening, of admonition, of instruction; what reve- 
lations of the grandeur of human character; and what signifi- 
cance hath this sad event for us as a nation and for the world ? " 
"Clouds and darkness are round about him;" the mystery oi 
God's Providence. The poet speaks of 

* * * " Tlie world's altar-stairs 
That slope thro' darkness up to God ; " 
or as David so beautifully expressed it when God had vindicated 
both his character and his cause in the death of Saul and his sons, 
. " He made darkness pavilions round about him, dark waters and 
thick clouds of the skies." In one of. those sad moods when his 
heart was all attuned to human grief, Cowper wrote to an afliicted 

friend these lines : 

" He who knew what human hearts would prove, 
How slow to learu the dictates of His love, 



Called for a cloud to darken all their years, 
And said, "Go, spend them in a vale of tears.' " 

When our joy seems most complete; wlien our sun is shining 
in its noontide glory; yea, when we least expect and are 
least prepared for it, the blow falls, our plans and hopes are 
baffled and all the human heart can say in explanation is 
" Clouds and darkness are round about him." In such a calamity 
as this, the mystery seems appalling, but our very lives are hedged 
about with mysteries, — yea, our pathway is paved with them. 
Who can tell how this plant takes on its tints of beauty, another 
no beauty at all; this one a rich foliage, another rarest beauty of 
flower, all from the same soil and sunlight? Who can tell how 
the immaterial spirit lays hold of muscle and brain and makes 
them its obedient servants? Canst thou tell whence come the 
thoughts of thine heart, or the motives which control thee ? Or 
how the Spirit of God works its wondrous transformations in your 
spirit, so that the things which you once loved are now hateful^ 
and thino-s formerly unloveable are now endowed with heavenly 
c^races ? Of old Nicodemus asked this question of the Saviour, 
who only said, "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hear- 
est the sound thereof ; but canst not tell whence it cometh or 
whither it goeth. So is every one that is born of the Spirit." If 
our most careful analysis, if our keenest vision, is baffled on the 
very threshold of these inquiries into matters of everyday life, 
shall we assume to solve the problem of that stupendous Provi- 
dence which robs a great nation of its chosen head in the hour of 
its greatest need, according to our judgment? 

Said Dr. Dwight, perhaps Yale College's greatest President^ 
" The Providence of God is the end for which the creation exists. 
Creation is merely a collection of means; immensely magnificent, 
indeed; an astonishhig display of contrivance; a sublime proof of 
Almio-hty agency; but by itself inexplicable." A great student 
of Nature, to the question of how these continents were builded, 
how these mountain ranges were uplifted, and how the rocks on 
all our hillsides were tilted into their present positions, modestly 
replied, "Behold the cloud;" mystery— mystery— mystery. 

But justice and judgment are the habitation of his throne; 
rectitude is engraven on every page of God's Providences, as by 
and by "Holiness unto the Lord" shall be written on the bells of 
the horses. The sinning Jews seemed to taunt God as unfaithful 
to liis people, but through the prophet Jeremiah the reply came. 



" Thus saith the Lord : If ye can break my covenant of the day 
and my covenant of the night, that there should not be day and 
night in their season, then may also my covenant with David my 
servant be broken;" and looking up to those heavenly bodies, the 
same as seen by Abraham and Isaac and Jacob, whose move- 
ments do not vary one second in a thousand years, they knew that 
God did not and could not change. Hence the rational basis of 
that promise so full of comfort, " For I am the Lord, I change not, 
therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed." The remark of the 
observant Guizot had such a philosophical basis, ''Providence 
hurries not himself to display to-day the consequences of the 
principles he yesterday announced. He will draw it out in 
the lapse of ages. Even according to our reasoning, logic 
is none the less sure because it is slow." And in a forgetfulness 
of this truth lies our peril. The patriot blood shed at Concord 
and Lexington seemed cruel butchery, and in itself it may have 
been, but God was working for our national iTulependence. Mr. 
Seward thought ninety days and 75,000 men sufficient to put down 
the rebellion, while emancipation, as a measure of God and 
humanity, was not thought of seriously. But in his second Inaug- 
ural, the martyr Lincoln saw, after four years of hard fighting, 
.the handwriting of God, while the great truth gradually dawned 
upon his rarely susceptible mind, and he wrote those memorable 
words that can never die, " Fondly do we hope, fervently do we 
pray that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. 
Yet if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the 
bondman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall 
be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall 
be paid by another drawn by the sword, as was said three thous- 
and years ago, so still it must be said, 'The judgments of the 
Lord are true and righteous altogether.'" Christ went to the 
cross as a malefactor, but he is recognized now in all the universe 
as Zion's King. What seems to-day a great wrong will yet 
appear an agent for good, for God maketh even the wrath of man 
to praise him, and out of chaos he evoked this world of life and 
beauty. Things perish which to our weak judgment ought to 
live; great men fall, when we think they can least be spared; 
decay and death lay their hands on that which we judge ought 
to be immortal; but from each grave of all these our buried dead 
comes back that voice divine, *' So then death worketh in us, but 
life in you." Ruskin, in his pellucid style, states this great truth 



concerning the law of decay in Nature and its relation to life very 
forcibly. "In the hand of the great Architect of the mountains, 
time and decay are as much the instruments of his purpose as the 
forces by which he first led forth the troops of the hills in leaping 
flocks ; the lightning and the torrent, and the wasting and weari- 
ness of innumerable ages, all bear their part in the working out 
of one consistent plan; and the Builder of the temple forever 
stands beside his work, appointing the stone that is to fall, and the 
pillar that is to be abased, and guiding all the seeming wilderness 
of chance and change into ordained splendors and foreseen har- 
monies." What we most need is not the assurance that God is 
rio-ht, but the faith to trust him. Over against our anxious human 
questionings stands the Saviour's reply, "What I do thouknowest 
not now, but thou shalt know hereafter." 

Let us turn now from the Providence itself to its lessons or 
significance for us as a people. First of all, God calls on us to 
recognize the Christian character of the man who hath passed 
away. " What constitutes a state ? " said the poet; and this was 

his reply: 

" Men who their duties know 

But know then- rights, and, knowiug, dare maintain." 
That was the ingrained spirit of General Garfield. There was 
not only a recognition of his rights, but of all men's rights, 
because they were men. This spirit of sturdy independence did 
not, as in Robert Burns, run to excess, and so become a vice, but 
it was his natural spirit sublinaed and harmonized by a deep 
Christian experience. General Garfield was a man— a great man, 
indeed; yea, more than that: he was a Christian man,— a man 
who be'lieved in God and believed God. He did not eliminate the 
divine element from his own conduct and life, nor would he elim- 
inate it from the public affairs of the nation. Consequently, while 
as a statesman he recognized the supremacy of the Constitution, 
with all its amendments as integral parts of it, in all the land,— 
and no statesman can do less,- as a Christian he recognized the 
fact that those who wore the gray were men, that no endunng 
reconstruction could be effected which ignored that fact; and the 
grand memorial service a few days since at Chattanooga by the 
"boys in blue" and the "boys in gray" was the South's loyal 
tribute to the breadtii and genuineness of his Christian manhood. 
This is Christian statesmanship, a recognition of the gospel spirit 
in the national policy, and is the rarest and best gift any man can 



lay on the altar of his country; and hence the wide-spreacl and 
profound sense of sorrow to-day in all parts of the land, verifying 
the Scripture saying, " When the righteous are in authority, the 
people rejoice;" and now that our righteous ruler is gone, all the 
people mourn. 

There were those a year ago who honestly felt that the nation 
must have for its leader the "man on horseback," as he was styled; 
not so much for the man himself as for what he represented, the 
sword and the bayonet; reconstruction and national salvation by 
stern and rigorous law. That there had been a need of heroic 
political surgery for some years after the war, was undoubtedly 
true; but the country had had it to its full satisfaction. God gave 
his chosen people first the dispensation of the Law, and then came 
the dispensation of the Gospel, " On earth peace, good will to 
men." So with us, this new dispensation of permanent recon- 
struction in the spirit and through the agency of Christian states- 
manship was God's next gift to the nation, and James A. Garfield 
was its apostle and martyr. Yes; and how the South, as well as 
the North, was shocked at his fall; how they gathered about his 
bed of suffering with a sympathy as tender, as genuine, and as 
loyal as ours, and how they stand with us to-day beside his bier 
and his gi-ave. Let there be no moi-e bloody chasm, — the heroic 
Garfield threw himself into it and bade the Nation clasp hands 
and be one over his newly-made grave; and shall we dare his dying 
command disobey ? 

After God's ancient Israel had crossed the Jordan into the 
Promised Land, representatives of all the tribes gathered stones 
from the Jordan's bed and with them builded a monument as a 
national testimonial to all generations of the deliverance the God 
of Israel had wrought. So let the visible, material monument 
that shall yet be erected as our Garfield memorial be the joint 
work of all the tribes of our American Israel, while the dead past 
shall bury its dead issues forever, and we give ourselves to the 
work he had so nobly and successfully begun, 

God also calls on us for Gratitude for him as a National Gift. 
Many young and brave men went down to early graves during 
the war for the Union, and in their graves were buried forever 
grand possibilities for themselves and for the nation. David saw 
this truth in his day and wrote, "O, my God, take me not away 
in the midst of my days." Had President Garfield been cut off 
in his youth, when he returned to his humble home from that 



canal experience with his system full of malaria, would the nation 
have suffered no loss? Reading, as we do our Hebrew Bibles, the 
events of his life backwards, we see what was the courage of his 
youth; his loyalty to that brave mother; what high moral convic- 
tions and purposes filled his soul; what zeal for culture burned in 
his young heart; what toil and privations he endured to secure it; 
what manhood was wn-ought out in him; how early and decidedly 
he took on the Christian life and character; what thorough, manly 
work he performed everywhere; what services he has rendered the 
nation; and how he fell at his post in the midst of his career. 
Could such a life, with such deeds and character, as a personal 
example and inspiration, and as the product of our American 
Christian civilization, be all blotted from the page of our national 
history, and the world suffer no loss? I tell you nay; that would 
have been a calamity greater than his untimely death, for having 
lived such a life and wrought such deeds, he " being dead, yet 
speaketh." Though with Wordsworth we mny say, 

"But yet I kDow, where'er I go, 
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth," 

we fall back on the precious promise of our God concerning the 
righteous dead, " They rest from their labors and their works do 
follow them." It is the projectile power of a Christian character 
which thus survives the righteous dead as it survives no other 
dead. When God enters a human heart and character there is an 
added divine force in that life, — and God honors his own work, in 
whomsoever found. No man can live a Christian life all the years, 
as President Garfield did, and have all the force of that life die 
with him. The sincere tokens of grief everywhere in all the land 
attest the nation's appreciation of the man as he was and all that 
he was, especially the Christian element of his character. 

Shall I ask you to contrast the regal manhood and the service 
of our murdered dead with the character and conduct of the 
assassin whose diabolical act robbed the nation of its choicest 
life? Nay; for while the moral instincts of the people see that 
the one has been borne as on angels' wings to Abraham's bosom, 
and though an outraged nation would quickly consign the other to 
the eternal infamy of Judas and hasten him to his own place, imitat- 
ing theChristian magnanimity of his victim we leave him in the hands 
of Him of whom it is written, " Justice and judgment are tlie 
habitation of his throne," and " Vengeance is mine, I will repay, 
saith the Lord." 



But President Garfield is dead; and as I speak unto you, strong 
men bear his body to the burial. Why did he die? what killed 
hira? or, GocVs Call to National Duty. This is not the hour 
nor the place to speak of the matter as a political issue. He fell 
a victim to the false spirit of our public national life which God 
has called upon us again and again to put away, and to whose 
removal this man had given himself. Because there is a philoso- 
phy of history, history repeats itself, and as a people we have 
fallen into the line of other nations' experiences and histories. 
The British troops had many reverses in their attempts to conquer 
these colonies, while in the English Parliament William Pitt, 
Burke, and others, were lifting up their voices against the king 
and his counselors. The English arms had their Saratoga, but 
would not yield until a retributive Providence sent a Yorktown. 
So Pharaoh in rapid and cumulative succession saw the plagues 
of frogs and rivers of blood, but hardened his heart against 
righteousness, until finally outraged heaven sent the angel of death 
smiting the first-born in every house in all the land, when the 
people rose in their horror and madness and compelled the haughty 
king to yield; just as Palfrey says the English people rose in their 
might on the accession of Charles the First and asserted their 
rights, which even the imperial Stuarts were forced to recognize. 
Herbert Spencer instances Cromwell's failure to establish 
permanently a new social condition of things in the realm, to 
"show how powerless is a monarch to change the type of the 
society he governs." Such transformations belong to both ruler 
and people united, and hence the significance to us of Garfield as 
a national opportunity. Prof. Edwards A. Freeman, the historian, 
says in his Lectures on the English Constitution, "Our Constitu- 
tion has no founder; but there is one man to whom \ve may give 
all but honors of a founder, one man to whose wisdom and self- 
devotion we owe that English history has taken the course which 
it has taken for the last six hundred years." The service which, 
according to the historian, the Earl of Leicester rendered the 
English people in that wonderful thirteenth century, was in some 
resjDects a prophecy of God's purpose to our people in the gift of 
such a man as our deceased President, and his untimely death 
changes not our duty or God's demands upon us. As a nation we 
have waited till, as mercy's last resort, God has sent the death- 
angel on his work, and we mourn to-day the loss of a chieftain 
slain by a pernicious system which ought long since to have been 



10 

•alDoIisliod. Pharaoh finally let Israel go, according to the divine 
command, but his sin was so great that punishment followed, and 
his army perished in the sea. Was it Jefferson who said, as he 
thought of the sinfulness of slavery, " I tremble for my country 
when I remember that God is just " ? Said Colonel Mason in the 
Constitutional Convention of 1787, "As nations cannot be pun- 
ished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable 
chain of causes and effects. Providence punishes national sins by 
national calamities." In that same convention Mr. Rutlege said 
" Religion and humanity had nothing to do with the question" of 
slavery. What was the reply of an avenging Providence in 
1861-65 to such blasphemies? Did religion and humanity have 
any interests at stake which the God of natione deemed it import- 
ant to vindicate? Do you wonder that discerning Anne of 
Austria said to Richelieu, " My Lord Cardinal, God does not pay 
at the end of every week, but at the hist he pays " ? And the his- 
tory of every civilized nation shows that national chastisement, 
though long delayed, is sure ; " Because sentence against an evil 
work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of 
men is fully set in them to do evil," is the significant language of 
Holy Scripture. That shot of July 2nd; those weary weeks of 
uncomplaining suffering; that death down by the sea; and this 
universal sorrow, is God calling the nation to its duty at this 
hour, and we disobey at our peril ! 

A World - Wide Prophecy is another significance of this sad 
event. Of old the prophet said of that kingdom wherein dvvelleth 
righteousness, " Of the increase of his government there shall be 
no end;" generation after generation it shall enlarge and unfold 
itself, till the stone cut out without hands becomes a great 
mountain and fills the whole earth. The old Puritan was right, 
in that God had much more light yet to break forth out of his 
word. DeQuincey once suggested that many of the excellencies 
and beauties of the human spirit are all unknown through lack of 
possible expression, and, like the far-off" hillside flowers, their 
loveliness is practically wasted, because none know and appreciate 
their beauty and sweetness. In harmony with this idea was the 
remark of a poet that 

"The world knows notliing of its greatest men;" 

which, if true, finds one explanation in the suggestion of Sir 
Philip Sidney, that, "Common birds fly in crowds; the eagle 
goes forth alone." But for all this God not only reveals himself 



11 

to the world in righteousness and judgment, lest men forget his 
unchanging supremacy, but he gives us occasional glimpses of the 
constantly increasing enlargement of that kingdom wherein the 
first great commandment with promise, and the second also, which 
is like unto it, shall find cheerful recognition and obedience. 
When the Son of God hung on the cross, Nature responded to the 
suffering in awful darkness and rended rocks, while mankind gave 
but little heed, though the event was one of transcendent human 
interest. It was scarce known as a matter of any importance 
beyond the limits of Jerusalem or its suburbs, and it probably 
occasioned no more than a passing remark in the city of the 
Caesars. But to-day when a great and good man is shot down 
and lies suffering for weeks, not only his personal friends but the 
nation itself, yea, all the nations of the earth, are gathered at his 
bedside in waiting prayer and sympathy. This symj^athy is as 
genuine and profound in London and Paris and Berlin and Vienna 
and Rome itself, yea, in all civilized nations, to-day, as among us. 
President Garfield's death comes not to them as a personal sorrow, 
as it does to us, but their grief is none the less genuine. England's 
noble queen lays her floral tribute on the casket of our dead, 
while her court, with that of Spain, and perhaps others, goes into 
mourning. As in the suddenness and brilliancy of the lightning's 
flash, the darkness is lifted as far as our vision can reach, — so by 
this sudden and great affliction God has swept away the subtle 
sophistries of diplomacy and rifted the clouds, giving the world 
to see the great golden bond of an universal brotherhood of man 
as it has never been seen before. Abraham was " wiser than he 
knew" when he voiced God's great law for the race, and one 
whose teaven-born significance we see and feel to-day as the world 
stands about this open grave, — "We be brethren." It is heaven's 
world-wide prophecy; yea, heaven's pledge that the time hastens 
when the earth shall be the Lord's from sea to sea, and from the 
rivers to the ends of the earth. Philosophical Tennyson was 
right when he wrote, in Locksley Hall, — 
"I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose ruus, 
And the thoughts of men are widened with the process of the suns." 

Surely the Isles have not waited in vain for God's law; nor has 
oppressed Ethiopia stretched her sable hands to God in vain for 
help; the great fact of this Christian brotherhood of all nations, 
races and tongues is at hand; and it was the Christian manhood, 
the Christian heroism, the Christian statesmanship of President 



12 

Garfield through which God has made it known as a fact and a 
prophecy to the world. God has patiently waited these thous- 
ands of years for the fulness of the time and for the man through 
which this prophetically significant fact of human brotherhood 
could be made known; and the honor of this high service has 
come to us as a nation through the death of our loved national 
chieftain. Well may the Simeons waiting for the new humanity 
lift up their eyes, saying, " Lord, now lettest thou thy servants 
depart in peace, according to thy word, for our eyes have seen thy 
salvation which thou hast prepared before the face of all 2:)eople." 

When all has been said of the heroism, devotion and Christian 
faith of the President and his honored wife; of the domestic 
purity, sweetness, and piety of that home, in upon which the eyes 
of the world have intently gazed for weeks; our highest pride 
and God's greatest satisfaction is in this, — that they did not stand 
on lofty pedestals apart from the j)eople, but they stood forth as 
the representatives of tens of thousands of homes, reflecting the 
honor and glory of our true American Christian manhood and 
womanhood. 

Oh, what a sight for the angels to-day, to see fifty millions of 
people turn aside from the nation's prosperous industries, from 
their own multiplied cares and bitter griefs, to gather about this 
one grave of their honored and loved chieftain. For long centu- 
ries God has waited for just such a tribute, for such homage to 
that which among men he j^i'izes most, — the worth of true 
Christian character. It is an event which marks an epoch, not in 
the world's history, merely; but one that marks an epoch in the 
unfolding of God's eternal purpose, and an epoch in the passing 
years of his own eternity. 

Could there come to us at this time a voice from the casket of 
our dead, would it not say, " As you cherish my memory, as you 
love yourselves, your children, your country, and your God, for 
my sake and for their sake, quit you like men; be strong in the 
Lord. Prove your loyalty to the work I attempted by carrying 
it forward to triumphant conclusion; let a united nation perform 
for itself and for the race a greater work than I could have per- 
formed, thereby revealing the higher wisdom of God in my death," 
And as on the wings of sacred song we waft up to our God and 
his God our praise and our prayer, let us go from this place to 
the high and holy work as from his grave he commands us. 



GARFIELD MEMORANDA. 



Born NtiveniLer 10. 18:51. 

(Ti-aduateil at ^Villiains 'College, ISod. 

In the Ohio Senate, 1859. 

Entered t!u' Army, 1 s(i I . 

Elected to C'ono-ress," ! stii'. 

Electe<l to the United States Senate, 1880. 

Inaugurated President, ]Marcli 4, 1881. 

Sliot July 2, I8S1. 

Died Septendu'i- lit, l>sl. 

Aue, -tit \rs., I() nios. 



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